AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE, overclocker noob need help

[pythonpro]

Hi. I'm a noob in this overclocking stuff. I've read that my CPU can be overclocked by just 'upping the multiplier in my BIOS. I just went and did that, and set it to 20x, which is 4.00Ghz. My computer booted up, then crashed after 3 seconds. I've now set it to 3.8Ghz, and it seems to be running stable.

How do I get my CPU to hit the 4.0Ghz+ ?

My system specs:
AMD II x4 965 Black Edition, Corsair H80 CPU cooler, ATI Radeon HD 5850, Coolermaster 750W PSU, 2x4 Corsair Vengeance 1600 Mhz, 40 GB Corsair SSD, 1 TB Samsung HDD, ASUS M4A7TD-V EVO, Windows 7 64-bit


Thanks for the help, I appreciate it!

 

[silverliquicity]

hey

Increase CPU Volatage

Increase FSB instead

 

[silverliquicity]

A rule that i follow...

Adjust Multiplyer to highest i can get it, then increase fsb as much as i can, the add voltage. i keep doing this until everything is as high as it can be.

 

[pythonpro]

How much voltage should be added? Currently its in auto, and it ranges from 1.007 to 1.673 V

 

[pythonpro]

@Malmental:

All my settings in BIOS is automatic, so I hope that it knows how to configure the voltage itself. I want to get to 4.0GHz + because I play Flight Simulators, and to run smoothly, I need to get a higher speed. I'm sorry, what is C2 and C3? And FSB?

I'm a complete newb.

 

[pythonpro]

I don't know what to look for (^picture of my cpu-z)

 

[tajisi]

First, a word of caution. If you do not know what you are doing before playing with these settings, you can easily fry your processor or render your computer inoperable.

Keep in mind overclocking is just a series of numbers and multipliers. You have a base frequency, let's say 200MHZ that serves as your system reference clock. All the other clock speeds (RAM, HT, CPU, Data Bus speeds, etc) are based off of this timer. Your multiplier takes the reference clock and multiplies it (surprised? ) to reach your clock frequency.

200 Base Clock, 10x Multiplier = 2.0 GHZ
240 Base Clock, 10x Multiplier = 2.4 GHZ
210 Base Clock, 12x Multiplier = 2.51 GHZ

As you turn up the speed on your CPU, it will require more voltage to get a clean electrical signal. The problem being that once you exceed 1.4 - 1.5 volts with the chip you have, it becomes easier and easier to kill the chip. Since you have water cooling, this mitigates the risk somewhat.

The problem comes in that CPUs have a hard speed limit at conventional (read: human survivable/sustainable) temperatures. You could pump the max volts through your CPU allowed by your motherboard on a suicide run, but still may hit an overclocking "wall" where further increasing the voltage will not result in any further gains. This represents the physical limits of the transistors inside the CPU.

In short, you may not be able to reach 4.0 GHZ in a stable fashion. It's like running a car's engine too hard. You might try to get a little extra performance out of it and end up wrecking the whole thing for less than a 10% performance boost going from 3.8 to 4.0.

 

[pythonpro]

So it's better to stay at 3.8Ghz and not touch any more settings?

 

[pythonpro]

Alright, I'm staying at this clock then, thanks for the help!